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Recent articles on Marginalia (by Gracia) alongside news and exhibitions.

Measuring Devices

March 28, 2017 Gracia Louise

Recently landed: Measuring Devices, a new article on Marginalia (by Gracia) takes you to Dance Massive

Melanie Lane and Lilian Steiner in Lucy Guerin's Split (image credit: Gregory Lorenzutti)

76!?! Fjord Review are "celebrating publishing over 500 pieces of dance writing”, and I am delighted and surprised to count that I have contributed 76 pieces since 2012. “Thank you to all our contributing writers for their #dedication, insight and passion. Writing about #dance is no easy feat, and being a dance critic involves many sacrifices, and yet here we are—thinking, writing and #reading about dance. So if it is a small miracle that we have such a brilliant cache of dance criticism evolving in today's messy world, it is in no small part due to our supportive, engaged readers—you—who are moved the possibilities of dance.”— @fjordreview ✨(Image credit: Betty Pounder, JC Williamsons’ resident choreographer, makes 'Jazz Spectrum', a new contemporary work, on The Australian Ballet, 26th March, 1964; source: The Australian Ballet, @ausballet)
#ballet
#hooray
#ausballet
#FjordReview
#readingwriting
#readingwritingthinking

#MIFF2018 Day 11
Arrive. Wait. Depart. Uplift. Gathering visuals, delighting in right angles, and, above all, finding hope in the waiting, if only a spark, still a #spark, over the course of a year in Germany. Indifference is a four-syllable word that does not apply to my time in Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport with an 18-year-old Syrian refugee named Ibrahim and an aspiring doctor from Iraq, Qutaiba. On a two-film day, sweeping from Karim Aïnouz’s ‘Central Airport THF’ to the mossed and impossible Icelandic landscape of Benedikt Erlingsson’s ‘Woman at War’ with power tools, vocal chords, and #environmental cause at the ready, danke, shokran, Þakka þér fyrir.
Film 33, CENTRAL AIRPORT THF (Karim Aïnouz)

Film 34, WOMAN AT WAR (Benedikt Erlingsson)
#hope
#refugees
#brightspark
#KarimAïnouz
#refugeecrisis
#CentralAirportTHF
#BenediktErlingsson

Walking in to #MIFF2018. Walking out from Iceland, Berlin, past, present, future, scramble. In and out, in and out. (Mural by Magic Lantern Studio, Lucy Parkinson and Gonzalo Varela.)
#onfoot
#passing
#MagicLantern
#strangeanimals
#leopardcantchangeitsspots

Some days roll, piece by idea, into a charmed and gruelling #MIFF2018 four-film day, and day 10 was one such day. One moment we were being swindled by the keys as the pianist played their own timed serenade to the McDonagh sisters’ ‘The Cheaters’ (1929), and the next we were in a succession of glass-plate photographs (taken between 1937 to ‘44) in Romania, as the words of a Jewish doctor Emil Dorian revealed all and fell. In a saturated palette trance, we found ourselves in ‘Zama’ with Don Diego de Zama and a llama, and heeded the whispered advice to keep our bloodied stumps in the sand if we wished to survive. (Hold on to the scene-stealing llama, it’s your only reprieve. This is brutal. This is colonialism. The cruelty of man. The greed of man. Then and now.) The furniture assembled on the sand, it could have come from the silent era, and a useless gift of a four-poster bed became a drying rack for dyed fabrics. With ears ringing from the relentless sound, doused in the sadness of it all, our final experience, the comparative ‘Wizard of Oz’ tonic of ‘Yomaddine’ by cart, with Beshay, Obama, and a donkey named Harby. Home is a leper colony. Home is true. And come judgement day (“yomaddine”), animals go straight to heaven. Those made into (tiger skin) rugs too.
Film 29, THE CHEATERS (Paulette McDonagh)

Film 30, THE DEAD NATION (Radu Jude)

Film 31, ZAMA (Lucrecia Martel)

Film 32, YOMEDDINE (A.B. Shawky)
#Zama
#Yomaddine
#TheCheaters
#LucreciaMartel
#McDonaghsisters

With ears like mountain peaks. (Another look at a corner of a collage from #FrenchConnections imagery which may or may not be drawn on the plate. Things are growing.)
#WIP
#nature
#collage
#lithograph
#newcontext
#outofcontext

#MIFF2018 Day 9: An owl-like in appearance potoo awaiting a plague of insects. The pad of prehistoric feet of a jabiru (I think, or was it a heron or an egret? A bittern? Did we see their face? Did Úrsula tell me but I was too busy looking at her necklaces and talismans; the exhumed bones lovingly cleaned in readiness to take their final resting place in the clan’s cemetery; the desert; the green; you could almost smell it; and then it rained, outside the Comedy Theatre; a bewildering sensory experience. And so I ask: was it a #jabiru?) as harbinger of bad things to come or mother protector, walking across the carpet. In La Guajira, with the Wayúu people (‘Birds of Passage’) flung from the soft silvered tones of ‘#Morocco’ and ‘Dressage’ at dawn: “estamos alrededor de tu fuego encontrando las palabras/ del silencio: donde anidan los pájaros del festín de la mañana” (“we are gathered around your fire finding the words/of silence: where the birds of the morning feast make their nest”), I collected horses, goats, #birdsong to rival a violin, and one of Amy Jolly’s apples which rolled into film four and fell on the floor (in ‘Ava’). Animals aplenty, symbolism, and visual threads to tie. The makings of a good day. Ready for more, Sunday. (Poem by Miguel López.) Film 25, DRESSAGE (Pooya Badkoobeh)

Film 26, MOROCCO (Josef von Sternberg)

Film 27, BIRDS OF PASSAGE (Ciro Guerra, Cristina Gallego)

Film 28, AVA (Sadaf Foroughi)
#birds
#ideas
#Dressage
#MarleneDietrich
#BirdsofPassage

A part of a whole. A collage from photographs, intended not as a finished image but as an image from which to draw on the plate. These owls may appear in the pocket of an etching. They may not. One thing is certain, the owl on the left is casting a spell with those eyes; she looks just like Lottie.
#WIP
#owls
#collage
#digitalcollage
#FrenchConnections

#MIFF2018 Day 8, a wonderful two-film day that was, for me, left hand resting in right, and I am reminded of the pleasure of a pair so complementary and different. Bitter sweet experience. Honesty. Love. The real bond of family that needn’t take only one form. Honesty and love make family. And, in ‘Retablo’, I am also reminded that you need to make artwork also for yourself. This is not a new revelation, but a reminder not to lose focus on the pleasure of making something and the honesty it too involves. Just as I felt I was becoming too focused on the outcome and how this will be achieved, there it was in the Peruvian Andes: enjoy making what you are making. My own #retablo. For now. Enjoy making. The message, the honesty, it will be in there. Leave some potatoes for the dough, not just the eating. (Shown in reverse order. Two films straight to the heart. Thank-you.) Film 23, RETABLO (Alvaro Delgado Aparicio L.) Film 24, SHOPLIFTERS (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
#Peru
#ideas
#making
#thisisfriday
#koreedahirokazu

Sweep, sweep, sweep. Thinking about what makes you read ‘frog’ where ‘fog’ is written (the word association of ‘The Green Fog’, #MIFF2018). Thinking about how the eye registers a miniature even when it is lifelike. More than the absence of details, is it the relative proportions being slightly off that first catches the eye (‘Nervous Translation’)? Sweep, sweep, sweep.
#Paris
#MIFF2018
#ideaharvesting
#visualharvesting
#ingloriousblackandwhite

Anguished. Pierced. Fatigued. Another glorious, visceral, day at #MIFF2018. And …. shadows fall on the soul (César Vallejo, 1892–1938). With last night’s white rabbit still in my hand (‘Nervous Translation’), to the Peruvian Andes, to ‘Retablo’, to see what further visuals I can harvest. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Alienation. Abandonment. Senselessness. Sweep, sweep, sweep.
#Peru
#Retablo
#thisisfriday
#CésarVallejo
#visualharvest
#NervousTranslation

#MIFF2018 Day 7 took me back to the ‘80s. The ‘80s, but not as I experienced them. The ‘80s in the house of LaBeija, Ninja, Xtravaganza (‘Paris is Burning’). The ‘80s through a doll’s house perspective. In the Philippines. (New York was a session ago — keep up.) With a white rabbit as a vessel to collect coins for white hairs plucked. With a Ningen pen for a beautiful life. The promise of a beautiful life. Place your palm on the television set and feel the static, hear the bristle. Rewind a cassette tape. Make the sound of the air conditioner. Hear and mistakingly record the sound of a dog barking in the night ('Nervous Translation'). Looking into two worlds, up close. Immersive, private, imaginative, through a magical lens. Where will today’s #films transplant me?
(Shown in reverse order)

Film 21, PARIS IS BURNING (Jennie Livingston)

Film 22, NERVOUS TRANSLATION (Shireen Seno)
#ACMI
#salvation
#abandonment
#ParisisBurning
#NervousTranslation

Learning every feather. Or the feel of them, at least. The Gouldian finch (Erythrura gouldiae), and a concentration of #Kookaburras sitting on a branch (titled “Our Jacks, Another” by A.J. Campbell, circa 1895; source: Museums Victoria). In readiness for a suite a prints, both etching and litho.
#WIP
#drawing
#specimens
#thisiswinter
#Gouldianfinch
#FrenchConnections

If one must miss a #MIFF2018 screening (of Bernadett Tuza-Ritter's doco, ‘A Woman Captured’) in order to make deadline monsters less unruly, it helps if one is in the plush company of a contented cat. Or two. Lenni, here, and Olive, out of frame but on the couch and also an embodiment of bliss, love the change to the schedule.
#cats
#home
#catcurl
#MIFForphan
#catsofinstagram
#siamesecatsofinstagram

It can be of little surprise that we awoke with no idea of where we were. In Morocco to attend a business deal sealed and dressed as a wedding, but lacking the desired sparkle of a guest(‘Sofia’)? In Mexico play-typing an email on a cardboard laptop with a beautiful young family of Honduran migrants holding tight and true while their Mum was incarcerated (’The Other Side of the Wall’)? No, it can be of little surprise. Such is #MIFF2018. And as we watched the collage of film and ideas in ‘The Image Book’, and the spliced humour and new meaning within ‘The Green Fog’ last night at ACMI, it can be no surprise that we awoke, bewildered, but with a keenness to return to work on our 15-metre collage of found material scanned from library books. ‘Ripples in the Open’ will be on display in November of this year, but first, more sourcing and scanning and trimming and reinventing. And more MIFF. We are only a third of the way through all the films we plan to see. Swimming in a wonderful soup!
#ideas
#dreams
#collage
#transformative
#RipplesintheOpen

She picked up the phone, but all she could hear was birdsong. Birdsong and the whistle of a frog. But I might be mistaken. (‘The Green Fog’). #MIFF2018 Day 6
(Shown in reverse order)
Film 17, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL (Pau Ortiz)

Film 18, SOFIA (Meryem Benm'Barek)

Film 19, THE CHILDREN ACT (Richard Eyre)

Film 20, THE GREEN FOG (Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin)
#films
#collage
#Veryigo
#dreaming
#GuyMaddin
#thisiswednesday

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